Linux home directories from OD?

[kamil]

We’re in the process of setting up our new Leopard install, including server. One thing I’d like to do is to get users Linux home directory paths from their entry in Open Directory.

Currently on Tiger we’re doing this by simply reading the nfsHomeDirectory attribute in their LDAP record. Unfortunately that yields rather long paths like /Network/Servers//Users, which doesn’t really fit in with the Linux environment. To make matters worse, on some machines they log in to, their home directory would not even be served from so the path would be simply inaccurate.

I’m wondering if anyone else has tackled this problem before, how did you solve it? I know many people have done the reverse, used an existing AD or OpenLDAP install to get Mac home directory information, but I haven’t seen much information about using Open Directory to serve Linux machines.

I was considering augmenting the OD schema to add a “unixHomeDirectory” attribute or something similar, but I know that in the past this has been fraught with problems, such as breaking replication.

Any thoughts or suggestions?

[kamil]

What I mean by “it wouldn’t work” is that we have a cluster of Unix machines that have their own set of home directories that are not the same as the standard user home directories, and are mounted from a different server. So if the attribute for the home directory path is /Network/Servers/machomedirectoryserver/Users that attribute is only accurate on half of our network, since on the unix cluster the home directories are served from another server. Of course, nothing prevents us from mounting those home directories in that same path, it just looks weird and could lead to some confusion.

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